The paper argues that youth have deep, albeit ambivalent, emotional, symbolic, and material-economic investments in the commercial consumer outlets located in their communities, and position them as complex sights of play, recreation, community identification, as well as places of employment. Indeed, while youth understand and articulate the relative success of their communities in and through such retail consumer establishments, at the same time, they see them as offering “bad” jobs, suggesting that they are poor paying, degrading and, in some cases, outright unsafe. For these youth, work and recreation reside at the interface of local and global forces, a phenomenon that increasingly characterizes work relations more broadly within a changing world.